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Case Closed Constantine Pleshakov,
visiting assistant professor of Russian and Eurasian studies,
is quoted in a San Jose Mercury News article about new
doubts cast on the identification of remains found in 1989 as
those of the Romanovs, Russia’s last royal family. Relying
on DNA testing, the Russian government announced that the skeletons,
found in a shallow communal grave in central Russia, were those
of Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and three of their children. But
a new Stanford study published in the January/February issue
of the Annals of Human Biology claims that the original DNA analysis
of the Romanov remains may be flawed, and that the recovered
DNA is too complete to have come from such old bones. Will this
stir up great concern among the Russian people? Probably not,
Pleshakov told Mercury News staff writer Barbara Feder
Ostrov. “Pleshakov,
who emigrated from Russia six years ago, believes the political
and religious intrigue surrounding the Romanovs is no longer
as divisive a national issue as it was a decade or two ago,” Ostrov
wrote. “‘I don’t think many people in Russia
will feel an urge to reopen the case,’ ” Pleshakov
said. And despite calls from the Russian Expert Commission Abroad
for a re-examination of the case, Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s government recently told Science magazine the case
is closed.”

Opening Salvo The March 4 Boston
Herald previewed the upcoming
2004 U.S. Women’s Open to be held over July 4 weekend at
The Orchards Golf Club on the campus of Mount Holyoke College.
According to George Kimball’s story:

This year’s 156-woman field will be vying for the total
purse of $3.1 million.

This year’s championship will be the fourth time since its 1946 inception
that the Women’s Open has been contested in Massachusetts, and the first
since Hollis Stacy won at Salem Country Club 20 years ago. Betsy Rawls won
the 1960 Woman’s Open at Worcester Country Club and the legendary Babe
Didrikson Zaharias won at Salem in 1954.

A hidden gem in the Holyoke Range of the Berkshires, The Orchards was created … in
1922, after Ross was engaged by one of [Mount Holyoke’s] trustees, Joseph
A. Skinner, whose daughter Elisabeth had developed a passion for the game.
Ross completed the first nine holes that year and added another nine five years
later. In the process, he became attached to the area. From this introduction,
Ross’s daughter Lillian chose to attend Mount Holyoke and graduated with
a degree in French in 1932.

The course Ross carved out of the 160-acre rolling woodland retains many of
the famed designer’s trademarks, including the same treacherous bunkering
and crowned greens found at Salem.

Trial by Camera An exhibition of photographs on display at the
Art Museum through March 28 has garnered lots of notice in recent
weeks. For example, an Associated Press story on Witnessing
the Nuremberg Trials: Photographs by Raymond D’Addario has
run in papers throughout the country. According to Adam Gorlick’s
AP story:

The Army sent Raymond D’Addario to Germany in 1945 to look the
monsters in the eye.

Instead of a rifle, D’Addario carried a Speed Graphic camera into a Nuremberg
courtroom to document the war crime trial of 21 Nazis.

Nine months and countless rolls of film later, D’Addario had produced
thousands of photos for the Army. Most of them are now sealed away in government
archives, but hundreds made their way into D’Addario’s personal
collection.

About 30 of those photos are on display at Mount Holyoke College through March
28 ….

Although D’Addario says he felt no sense of historical significance while
he was covering the trial—”It was just another job,” he likes
to say—Nuremberg quickly became an obsession for the then-25-year-old
from Holyoke.

He spent his free time roaming the bombed-out city, photographing the destruction
before Nuremberg was rebuilt. “Everything was interesting to me,” he
said. “It was a city without buildings. I’d never seen anything
like that before.”